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Recently I’ve been pretty fucking meta, talking about talking about the talks we need to be having in the ongoing Polytheist dialog. This is all important and also still deeply frustrating, so I want to say a few things about why I do it.

First, I’m not in any way attempting to change the minds of the the fuckwit detractors — defensive Neo-Pagans who can’t see over their own bulging insecurities to the grounded feet of reason, or desperate atheists trying to find a place for themselves in a conversation that isn’t about or for them — because changing the minds of idiots is fools’ fuckin’ folly.

So who am I writing for, if not the people who come for the conversations at night, with their pitchforks and torches…?

I am writing for the people who aren’t sure yet, and need bolstered support or clearly delineated space to figure this shit out. I don’t have time or care for assholes who think they’ve got it all figured out (and yet keep traipsing into other people’s conversations which don’t pertain to their supposedly sorted shit at all) or otherwise assume nobody has a fucking clue and so we’re all equally ignorant in this (equality doesn’t work that way, dumbass, go feel your way through a dark room someplace else, preferably near a cliffside over a pool of lava and fucking sharks) and blah blah blah. I don’t have time for that shit. What I do have time for, though, is folks who are genuinely feeling out their call from the gods, even if they haven’t figured it — or its implications — out yet.

The truth of the matter is that most Americans who find their way to Polytheist religion did so through a conversion (and education) process, defined less by singularly redefining experiences (though perhaps those, too) but more by a gradual process of paradigmic shift. What that means is that education is essential to the process of Polytheists becoming Polytheists. Education simply cannot happen — literally, at all — if the boundaries of the subject and state-of-mind are not examined and outlined and fiercely guarded from erasure. (Imagine you’re a Freshman in college, and after years and years of oppressive closed-minded small-town local public schooling, you finally find a subject of disciplined study that you feel passionate about, that completes you, in which you feel and clearly hear your calling and destiny, only to then find out that due to budget cuts the department covering that discipline is being erased and replaced with Johnny Humanist endlessly misinterpreting Jung, but that’s okay because it’s all imaginary anyway so you can just imagine really really hard that you have found your calling.) Erasing, ending, collapsing, or reducing the Polytheist conversation is a lot like that.

I did not have a conversion experience. I have never not been Polytheist and animist — Polytheanimist — and so I sometimes am not the most clued-in person to what the needs of the conversion conversation are. But I’m trying. That said, those experiencing “conversion transition” — the gradual process of becoming Polytheist, which can take years or even a lifetime all on its own — aren’t always the best choice to define or take a stab at what is on the other side of that transitory process, because they maybe haven’t yet fully stepped into the embodied state-of-mind (paradigm) of Polytheist religion. You can’t predict what you can’t see, and you can’t see what you don’t make room for in your proverbial algebra, and you can’t make room for what you can’t see if you think that the only things that are real are the things that you can see, that you have experienced, and that you control in some way.

So for the last whole bunch of years, I’ve been paying close attention to conversion dynamics so that I can see it, account for it as best I can, and try to help. Not to convert people — I’m not that guy and these are not those religions — but to assist in willful and consented conversion by providing the frameworks, spaces, conversations, and critical distinctions necessary to figure this shit out.

A whole lot of people are taught rather forcefully not to have certain types of conversations, and so it can be hard for them to learn how to do so, because it is not just ignorance that they’re overcoming: it’s emotional resistance their own self-applied obstacle course. Education and outreach is about supporting people through all that shit, rather than just assuming that like super-heroes they can just wipe their internal fields clean and start over. It rarely works that way.

This conversation isn’t about enabling our aggressors, but rather, empowering those actively trying to figure out what their Polytheist selves look like, how they conceive of themselves in a world populated by many, many gods, and what that means for them moving forward with their religious practices, with their world presence, and with their engagements to other prior ways of viewing or associating with some of these subjects.

There is a streak of “don’t ask don’t tell” that runs the gauntlet of many levels of the Western societal experience, including many of the Neo-Pagan lines of descent that many Polytheists find themselves emerging from, wherein there’s a strong sentiment of don’t-rock-the-boat because it might knock people overboard. Well, honestly, some motherfuckers don’t belong on the boat, because they got on the wrong damn boat. I don’t want them to drown but it isn’t my job to help them find where they’re supposed to be, and I sure as shit ain’t Noah. Polytheist religion isn’t about two-by-two preservation of ignorance or anything-goes spirituality. The proverbial Polytheist fleet — which is, by the way, not just one boat because that is a really really terrible way to run a Navy — is made up of many boats to contain the religious practices of many people and many traditions serving many gods in many different configurations, and these boats aren’t so fucking fragile that they’ll capsize if you rock them just enough to knock the rats off the lines.

Hold steady, Polytheists, and learn your sea-legs: the waves are choppy and full of gods, the winds are terrible and full of gods, the thunderous crash of electro-static discharge goes wherever the fuck it wants and is hurled by gods, but you’ll get the hang of it, in time. Maybe being up on deck during a hurricane isn’t for you, though: go down to your bunk, tie yourself to a beautiful lover, and fucking rock the boats.

People often ask me why I bother writing so much about secular, archetypal, or Monotheist views, definitions, assumptions, and (mis)informations, in my discussions and articles pertaining to the progressing Polytheist dialog. It did not occur to me until this morning that people aren’t asking this rhetorically; they literally don’t understand why these conversations matter.

(And, as John Beckett‘s writing — or more appropriately the wildly chaotic rounds of confused commentary from people who just-don’t-get-it — has demonstrated recently, this isn’t only relevant in the circles I’m observing or engaging with. He even had to do a follow-up.)

I’m very much looking forward to seeing the program laid out here carried forward beyond the stage of explaining its preconditions… There’s a line somebody said at some point, about philosophers never getting past the prefaces to their projects; it’s the same problem. [We] get bogged down in situating the project, and the arguments [entailed], and people end up thinking that WAS the project.

A fucking stupid amount of effort is being put into writing, year after year, about what “the Polytheist conversation is all about” and “why it matters”, and a nearly infinite and deeply frustrating amount of preamble is necessary just to set the stage for the conversations our communities are seeking to have within the discipline of Polytheist religious discourse and development. Polytheist religion — the affirmed religious regard for many gods, who are real and distinct beings, rather than (at the theistic level) reductions of a larger reductionism, or archetypal expressions of humankind’s collective mythic consciousness — is a discipline unto itself, which should not need to be repeatedly pointed out. When Polytheist religion is being discussed (at the focus of an individual or collective level), the focus is in fact going to be on Polytheist religion, rather than on general Paganism, comparative religion, secular humanist theory, cultural anthropology, or mythographic relativistic whatever-the-fucks.

21st Century Western Society is polarized between an increasingly militant Religious Right (by which we mean “Monotheism” and more specifically certain denominational directives within Christianity) and a bizarrely zeal-powered and proselytizing secular sector — including but certainly not limited to the supremacists in New Atheism — and within alternative religion demographics (such as Neo-Paganism) there are increasing and successively stronger currents of secularist respectability, Humanism, Atheism, anti-theism, and anti-religion. 21st Century Western Society is also the background-of-origin from where a whole lot participant members1, and clergy, and dedicated laity, and the courageously devoted who as yet may have no roadmap for answering the call to their gods, all who make up the Polytheist Movement, are coming from; those who are engaging in the collective and collaborative restorations and reconstitutions of lost, erased, besieged, or destroyed Polytheist religious traditions. There are a whole lot of people coming out of the Western Society’s (disastrous) world-views and into Polytheist religion, and trying to figure it out against all odds and obstacles, internal and external to them.

With this in mind one must be able to recognize that the stagnant, crippled cognitive processes and perceptual retardations proffered them by their parent societies around theistic endeavors and spirits-affirmed theological premises of engagement, are staggeringly lacking in helpful understandings, paradigmic advancements, or understanding of core foundations necessary in Polytheist religion.

By which we mean, Western Society — from a Polytheist standpoint pertaining to Polytheistic religious process and practice and undertakings — is fucking broken, and has broken off inside of basically everyone, leaving behind awful fucking splintery septic shrapnel even in attempts to wrench it bodily the fuck out of one’s heart.

And that damn shrapneled debris embedded infectiously throughout the population seeking something different — Polytheist religion and polytheistic engagements and process and relationships and theologies — are written and composed in the language of polarizing “Monotheism” and erasive secularism.

The Polytheist Movement2 is an informal collective of voices, leaders, priests, laity and theologians, who are having conversations intent on extracting this shrapnel and make spaces for safe, sane, and sanitary3 Polytheist religious discourse and developments.

Part of that extraction process means discussing and identifying where the fucking thorns are embedded, and what the influence and/or infectious impact of them might be in how a person engages or shows up to these other things.

If a person comes to Polytheist religion with the definitions of “god” that they got from either secular American society or a culture-wide Monotheist murder machine, they’re unlikely to have an easy or terribly useful time emerging into Polytheist religions.THOSE DEFINITIONS ARE INCORRECT when applied to the study of traditional world religion (e.g. Polytheist religion), and so they need to be corrected (in order for the developed Polytheist religions to have a chance of growing, surviving, and deepening). This corrective adjustment is necessary not for the purposes of wiping out secular Humanism (e.g. archetypal Jungian psychology), or Monotheist congregational practices or household identity, but for the purposes of purging their septic saturation from the bodies, minds, and hearts of those who, as Polytheists or polytheistic religious seekers, are consenting to the search for religions of relation which affirm with religious regard the many, many gods.4

This is a complicated and surgical multi-axialed process…

It is not a process which is centrally “about” debating the history of language evolution or changes — although since language is how we communicate these concepts, it will include this as a means to these theistic ends.

It is not a process which is centrally “about” debating the nature of the substance of being or creation, in the sense of “the source of material and immaterial”-ness found in Monistic pursuits— although since most religions address or hold to certain assumptions regarding such considerations, these will be included as a means to these theistic ends.

It is not a process which is centrally “about” syncretisms or blending or intersecting religious or spiritual or magical traditions— although in recognizing the globalization of culture and religious tradition throughout history (past and present and future) and the fact that gods and spirits make all kinds of different agreements and provide all kinds of different experiences to all different kinds of peoples, these considerations will be factored in as a means to these theistic ends.

It is not a process which is centrally “about” arriving at a “pan-polytheistic religion” which holds as container all polytheistic religions— although as with the above in recognizing the global quality of the world’s populations, and the relationships which gods themselves oft hold with and toward one another, religious collaborations or alliances will be utilized as a means to these theistic ends.

It is not a process which is centrally “about” ending Monotheist religion or stamping out secular supremacy— although as it is a process about Human Rights and Religious Freedoms5 it stands to reason that positions will be taken fiercely against eugenic erasure, cultural murder, and supremacist stances, as a means to these theistic ends, (and basic fucking decency, you dumb fucks.)

It is not a process which is centrally “about” breaking away from or dismissing or negating the importance of 20th and 21st century Neo-Paganism or magical traditions born largely from white British and American men at the end of the 19th century6, or their related and resulting communities— but as Polytheist religion has no real relationship to these structures of thought or engagement, and are not primarily magical traditions, do not descend from post-Christian Humanist thought, and are not geared primarily toward human-centered self-help or consciousness-oriented-elevations, conversations drawing disciplined discernment around the distinctions and differentiations based on definitions will be employed in order to unravel Polytheist identity from the places where it has become near hopelessly tangled with other things, a lot like untangling multiple balls of different colored yarn from, say, a string of prayer beads: it’s not that yarn needs to fucking die, but it also is unrelated to the fucking prayer beads. And so, the unraveling will happen, as a means to these theistic ends.

It is not a process which is centrally “about” rejecting the Feminist Spirituality movements’ use and development of the term “The Goddess”7 (created as a tool against the spiritual oppression of the patriarchy)— but as this expression and phrasing and approach are often in popular practice directly antithetical to exploring or practicing traditional Polytheist religions, the Goddess Movement is unlikely to be catered to with regard to this term or associated ideas, as Polytheist religionists — religious minorities and at-risk demographics themselves, culturally and theologically in the 21st century — will need to do what they need to do to arrive at their own necessary structures of language and religious discourse, drawing often from traditional (pre-Christian) methods of discussion and in general working tirelessly to “re-populate” religion with the many gods, which are by and large neither Monotheist or Dualist in framework, as a means to these theistic ends. (While this statement could be read as an attack on Feminist Paganism and Goddess Movement work, please understand that I find these things to be not only good but also of vital importance. However, just as Goddess Movement work is not the same as, say, a French culinary school, (also a thing that is important for anyone who likes French cuisine), the Goddess Movement is similarly not (usually) all that related to Polytheist religion. This is not because there is anything wrong with the Goddess Movement, or what its focuses seem to be, but because it is about other things. It turns out that the universe has lots of things in them — many, not just one or two or three! — and it’s OK to have different groups, focuses, disciplines, and categories of spiritual process focusing on different things. Drawing a distinction between them isn’t the same as dismissing or rejecting some.)

In this process, the effects and symptoms of infectious and embedded Monotheism and Secularist Humanism are contrary and quite harmful to the developments and identity-levels and practice-level and theological levels (the “ends” mentioned above), which — personal views8 or biases of this author aside — is not an objective statement against either Monotheism or Secularism or those people for whom these are ways of life and being and approaches-to-world-and-Self, but rather, diagnostically speaking9, they are foreign bodies which Polytheist discourses must create antibodies to within our own immune responses, that what we are trying to do, and be, is able to be, and be done, without dying10.

The above does not mean that the Polytheist conversation does not include amongst its many voices persons with such backgrounds as language scholarship, Feminist theory, social activism, Neo-Paganism, Wicca, Ceremonial Magic, psychology, and so forth; rather, it means that the study and development of Polytheist religion is a discipline unto itself, a primary focus on its own, and the pursuit of it should be understood chiefly to be about Polytheist religious developments. This does not mean, as has often been misunderstood and asserted by detractors, that a given voice in the Polytheist discourse is only interested in their work toward advancing Polytheism to the exclusion of all other topics in life; quite the contrary, many involved in the discussion also own businesses, work as professors, artists, or scholars in other fields and disciplines, enjoy watching films or writing and reading novels, just like anybody else. The point here is not to suggest that Polytheists must exclusively concern themselves with the development of Polytheisms, but rather, that the discipline of Polytheist religion must be understood to be so focused. This is not a restriction on who is/is not a Polytheist, beyond the basic qualifiers (of affirmed religious regard for many gods), but rather what must be understood as (at least one of) the focuses of and in Polytheist religious discourse.

That this needs to be stated and explained, over and over again, is fucking disheartening.

We are talking about religious development and occasionally referencing languages to do so; that does not mean we are talking primarily about languages. We are talking about Polytheist religious theology and occasionally reference Catholicism; that does not mean that we are talking primarily about what a random Catholic believes (or does not believe), or whether the words that they use to characterize their beliefs are accurate. We are talking about Polytheist religious identity, and in so doing must often draw forth distinctions between this and general Neo-Paganism; that does not mean that we are talking primarily about Neo-Paganism. We are talking about what are effectively quite radical religious ideas (wherein radicalness is a term applied by others, for to us this is all just the way it fucking is) and in this we may find cause to draw from the language of radical theory and structures of radicalism for illustrative purposes in contrasting the wrongs of a corrupt, colonizing oppressor; that does not mean that we are talking primarily about radical political or socio-economic theory. Any field of study or discipline may reference areas which are the focus in other fields or disciplines, without needing to raise those up to the primary focus of the conversation, unless doing so would further the actual ends of the actual discipline being engaged through. This is about godsdamned wound-care, triage, surgical extraction of wicked fucking objects, that we can see a reduction in unnecessary harm, open the way for religious healing and restorations, and occasionally come up for air so that we can keep going, because this work is bloody hard.

In pulling the toxic shrapnel pipe-bombed into us by a thousand years of murderous corruption and misinformation and cultural genocides, we will challenge fallacious structures and ideas and language in order to identify its insidiously puncturous tract through our own tattered selves, as we attempt to assemble from ourselves — those pieces which remain after a broken age has had its way with us all — a patchwork which we can spread as cloth upon the altar of pious praise for our many gods, who — with varying levels of patience — wait for us. Or, in some cases, do not wait at all… and have the engine keyed and accelerating whether we’re ready or not.

To put this business another (illustratively metaphoric) way:

If somebody is seeking to paint a wall fire-engine red with a smooth high-gloss reflective finish, and the wall had been previously covered with forty-years of chewing-gum and “lost cat” postings and concert flyers, they need to — prior to undertaking the job of paint-and-gloss rather than merely applying these as cracked and lumpy veneer layered atop them — remove those other things. (And, for those people11 engaged in the constructive job of rebuilding a section of a wall, or in some cases bringing one up from the rubble, they often find that they cannot replace more than a brick or two before glossy-eyed zombies “seekers” show up with wads of chewed-up bubble-gum and lost cat posters to hang fresh, entirely overlooking the fact that an active and vital religious structural restoration is taking place.) This needs to fucking stop.

Not because chewing gum is awful (well….) or because lost cat postings are really just codified correspondence between rogue cells of the Illuminati (although…) and not because concert flyers are a gateway to good sex and fist-fights (if they’re the right venues, anyway…), but because these things directly stand in the way of the “end”, the goal, at hand.

But it turns out cleaning chewing gum and decades worth of tacked and stapled and rotting papers and stickers and nailed-up-squirrels from a wall is actually not as straight forward as “taking them down”. There’s an actual set of unique and necessary processes for removing each of these, since — for the sake of metaphor — the wall in question cannot be merely ripped down and built anew, because maybe it’s of historic significance, and therefore methods of identifying the offending particulates and embedded obstructions, accurately, and engaging their removal efficiently because it is necessary.

So sit down, shut the fuck up, and let us paint our worlds red.

You can revel with your lost-cat chewing gum all you want, but if you bring that noise anywhere the fuck near our work-spaces, expect to get a face full of everything we learned in the pit at really awesome concerts.

Only one of these two things is a tiger. The one other should shut the fuck up when tigers, a critically endangered species being poached by entitled and opportunistic humans to the brink of non-existence, are being talked about as a focus.

Endnotes:

I am by no means ignoring those world religious communities who have never lost their Polytheistic religious identities, but rather, pointing out that these are not the primary demographics engaged in the conversations referenced. This, then, should be understood as a discussion primarily about reconstituting Polytheist traditions which have been lost, not in dismissal of those which remain intact today, but quite the contrary; for many persons coming from those traditions, it is observed as astounding that these basic pre-101 conversations even need to be had. In other words, many of us engaged in the Polytheist movement are trying to proverbially “catch up” with those traditions at the dialog and community level, in our own restorations and reconstructions and religious recalibrations.

The Polytheist Movement as defined by me can be read about a bunch of places, including here in a guest post at The WildHunt, in an article titled “A Polytheist Primer”, which seeks to introduce readers to the distinctions between identity-level Polytheists (e.g. “I am a Polytheist”), collective polytheistic religious traditions (e.g. “I am a member of a polytheistic religious tradition”), and the Polytheist Movement, the latter of which can be understand as a multi-disciplined activism oriented movement and collaboration to further the “cause” of creating safe places for in-depth and focused Polytheist religion, religious dialog, theological developments, education, outreach, and community building.

Safe, Sane, Sanitary: pretty self explanatory, but in the interests of my usual over-disclaiming, by “safe” I mean “safe from outside intrusive harm, trolling, interruption, erasure, derailment, and abuse”; by “sane” I mean “rational discourse conducted between mature and learned or learning adults”, profanity notwithstanding; and lastly by “sanitary” I mean not fucking miasmically toxic, as happens basically anytime Johnny Humanist shows up and sticks his withery little dick in everyone’s casserole to check the temperature of their archetypes, or whatever.

Human Rights and Religious Freedoms are things we take pretty seriously, around here, especially with regard to protecting religions and ways of religioisity which any majority demographic would oppressively seek to erase from consideration or conversation.

19th Century White Guys — pretty straight forward, actually. If you don’t know the basic bullet-point history of the occult “renaissance” of the late 19th century, it involves a bunch of White dudes with enough money to afford lots of leisure activities(like world travel, mountaineering, recreational drugs, and so forth) and paid-in fraternal associations and so forth, who did a tremendous amount of scholarship and mystical undertakings, including developing what the popular understandings of Ceremonial Magic are in use today, drawing from the various expressions of Hermeticism and the Western Esoteric Tradition(s). These have, as you might have guessed, virtually nothing to do with Polytheist religion, despite many of the adherents applying codified use of deity names and associations (used more as occult symbols than real deific agents) to occult concepts generally focused on the development of human consciousness (rather than, you know, religion, or worship, or theology). That people still draw from this line of thought in association with Polytheism is problematic, not because there is anything wrong with this line of thought, but that this line of thought is called something other than Polytheistic religion. Which is why we have different words for things.

“The Goddess” was a revolutionary concept loosely based in historic goddess worship, and became the focus of various women’s spirituality movements in the 20th century. While there is a lot of important spiritual, mystical, and magical developments within these circles, there is precious little focus on religious devotion, and the observed inseparable popular view of “The Goddess” in the singular (and the telescopic collapsing of all female deities into this one identifier) which, again, just isn’t Polytheism. That it isn’t Polytheism doesn’t mean it isn’t spiritually important, magically useful, or of central social significance (specifically to the very important work done in the mystic sectors of Feminist theory and activism and social change) especially considering the rampant misogyny, rape, assault, and patterns of patriarchal abuse found in some sectors of occult, magical, and Neo-Pagan development.

Personal biases are things we all have. Mine are contained in views that not everyone agrees to. I have them, I weigh in with them from time to time, but they’re not what is being discussed here. Knowing our own biases is important in order to aim for more intelligent and less emotionally reactive dialog, bitches.

“Diagnostically speaking” should not be taken to mean a literal biological/immunological model being posed here, but rather, it is a fucking illustration. I tend to draw on those a lot. Because when you just come out and say a thing — as has been done on this shit hundreds of times — people are often too thick-headed to get it. Which is why illustrative language is experimented with. For science.

“Without dying” should be taken in this context to reference “the death of the dialog“, and moreover, the continued erasure of these religious ways of being, viewing, practicing, and experiencing; at this time I am not referencing literal (mortal) death of the sort which other at-risk communities (such as Black Americans, Trans* youth, and LGTBTQ demographics domestically and abroad) face every day. This is not a competition, and a focus by the Polytheist Movement to prevent the death of our religions and the loss of our religious freedoms and the spaces to have our necessary dialogs and developments should not be interpreted — as it occasionally has been — as a dismissal of other vital social and human issues, which many of us are also involved in separate from (or directly because of) our Polytheist identities and devotions, elsewhere.

This was pointed out by Amorella Moon, following a sneak-peak of a draft of this article, wherein she drew attention to the fact that some people just don’t get that rebuilding needs to happen, or that that wall, that structure, exists for more than just smearing your shit on.

Julian wrote, in the comments of a recent post of mine, that he has been:

… thinking about Polytheism (big P) as being about potential, as well as actuality. Simply allowing for the possible presence of multiple divinities is sufficient, in my rendering, to qualify as Polytheism. The total number of Gods is both unknown and immaterial, and fussing over how many are required/actual/known Gods there are is unhelpful. A system that acknowledges a single “known” deity while also allowing for the possibility of other “unknown” or even “false” Gods could be understood as Polytheistic since it acknowledges the possibility of other Divine presences. Polytheism then is, necessarily, ambiguous and tense, possessing multiple centers of /truth production/, real or imaginary.

I agree with a lot of what the author is saying here, and it is part of what I’ve been trying to communicate: Polytheism, when approached in a certain way, is about a radically inclusive and exponentially expansive set of virtually unrestricted potentialities; the only requisite in this is that it is defined in the correct fashion, which is merely “the affirmed and acknowledged religious regard for many gods”, and does not necessitate worshipping any specific number of them, or naming any specific combination(s) of them.

A person could be a Polytheist without knowing ANY gods, or having ANY system of divine organization (e.g. nations of spirits, choirs of agents, pantheons of gods, etc), so long as their basic core -theistic lens is one which “affirms and acknowledges with religious regard” that there [are/may be] many gods.

In this way, “there are many gods” and “there may be many gods” are logically identical statements, as neither positions the agent-observer outside of the potentiality of the uncountable divine, nor prohibits them from relation in the future (or present) with any such combinations.

The issue is not in struggling to define Polytheism, but rather, to help people to clarify when they are in fact not discussing -theistic engagements at all. For example, when a Catholic attempts to argue that their religion is Monotheistic, they are confused about what the terms mean. (Clarifying piece: I defend VICIOUSLY the rights of Catholics to -identify individually- as Monotheists, and do not see it as any person’s place to obstruct self-applied identifying language. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re using the most accurate language available, however, and in respecting identity term selection, I can still call for a critical discussion of the meanings of words.) The Catholic faith is one with many spirits and divinities, including angels (the vast majority of which are divinities and lesser-deities themselves) and so forth. It is therefore by definition NOT Monotheistic, in a literal sense. Nor is any other tradition so aligned.

However there are some who would argue that the Monotheism of Christianity is maintained by recognizing that all of the religious and spiritual elements — god, angels, etc — are metaphors for the universe, and the “God” exists outside of such considerations. Which is of course a perfectly reasonable (and vaguely gnostic) suggestion, however, it is not actually a -theistic premise at all. It’s an “other-than-theistic” or even “non-theistic” stance. It is not Monotheism, or any other kind of -theism, in that stage of thought or regard: it’s Monistic. Which is further to say that a “God” concept which “exists outside of such considerations” is not, in fact, a god; in calling it that, one slides into fallacious assertions right quick. In this same grain, a thing being called an automobile — say, for example, a large rock on a hillside — which has no wheels, nor axles, nor means for ground transportation or movement of any kind, which also cannot be entered into, or controlled, or moved, is not an automobile; calling it a car does not in fact make it a car, and leaves it still quite established as a large rock. There is nothing wrong with rocks, unless of course they are being positioned as cars, in which case there are lots of things wrong with them; notably their lack of car-ness.

The existence of an other-than-theistic mode of consideration — such as is found in gnostic process — does not force Monotheism, nor negate Polytheism; because an other-than-theistic mode of consideration is NOT assessing theistic things. It would be like saying that a person going into the forest to study rocks is denying the existence of the trees, simply because they’re there for geological reasons not directly focused on the squirrels residing in the trees. Different lenses of consideration, examination, and engagement are necessary — and nuanced — and how we should be driving the discussion, so as to avoid all this bullshit.

If people got more comfortable accurately identifying what it is that is being talked about or engaged — theistic vs other-than-theistic considerations for example — then we’d really be able to “get somewhere” in theological discourse. But people get stuck in the familiarly circular trap of just dick-swinging on all of this.

If archetypes are being discussed, regardless of whether they’re being called by the same names as gods, it is not gods who are being discussed. It is a realm of psychological theory. Not religion. Not -theism. When a Humanist is discussing “Odin as archetype”, they are no more discussing Odin the god than a boar-bristle beard brush for sale on Amazon called “ZEUS” is, in fact, the god Zeus. A hair-brush whose product model is called Zeus is not the god Zeus. An archetypal concept called Odin is not the god Odin. Discussions of archetypes are, and should be, discussions about archetypes… if only the ones having them would learn to identify them as other-than-theistic, rather than attempting to assault the fabric of OTHER conversations or modes of agencied engagement (which ARE theistic) for self-referential purposes.

The collective conversation (from the standpoint of Polytheists’ engagement) needs, I think, to lead the charge in assessing -theistic from other-than-theistic distinctions. When some yahoo is rambling about how gods are “just archetypes”, that’s not ANY different than somebody claiming that “Zeus is JUST a beard-brush! With such luxurious boar bristles!” Which is to say, they’re having a non-sense discussion, which should not be engaged with (if one’s intention is to push Polytheistic or even just -theistic considerations and theological topics forward).

Not every conversation needs to be a -theistic conversation, and so it is possible to discuss archetypes without “offending and insulting” Polytheists; the easiest way to do this is recognize that the conversation is not a -theistic one, but a psychological or conceptual mythological one, and establish that as the narrative framework, rather than trying to drag OTHER topics (such as theistic ones) into a framework where they don’t fit. That is like the geologist in the forest trying REALLY hard to pull squirrels into geological classification: it just doesn’t work. Squirrels are not rocks, no matter how “rock colored” they might be, or how “rock hard” their frozen corpses may become in February.)

But this isn’t, of course, just about — or even primarily about — outward/external discussions, but internal frameworks of understanding, relations, and regard.

It is insufficient for the geologist to merely stop talking to wildlife rescue professionals about how squirrels are actually rocks and they — the rescuers — are just confused and wrong and not trying hard enough. The geologist must strive to internalize these as divergent spheres of consideration: rocks and mammals are not the same thing, and probably are different enough to warrant distinct disciplines. Which is why there are distinct disciplines to discuss and describe them.

Similarly, the person discussing beard brushes needs to not only stop asserting that Zeus is a beard brush, but similarly, stop looking at their beard brush as though it is a god, or at gods as though they exist to boar through a gnarly beard.

This is a basic critical standard that I really think we should start offering up as a basic requisite for opening one’s mouth, proverbially or otherwise, in discussions which are to be taken as serious.

Following yesterday’s post at Polytheist.com​‘s Facebook feed, wherein I reminded folks what the platform exists for (and who it exists to serve and engage), a reader responded with a question about one statement I made regarding mythology. Many Polytheists today draw a large bulk of their religious underpinnings from mythological literature, often without clear instruction or training in how to distinguish mythic lit from theological works from religion or religious text, mish-mashing it all together in just one big vat of “these are our wordsies on the pagies!” kind of thing. I’m clearly not anti-mythology or anti-academic, although this particular reader took that message away from what I wrote. Here was my reply to him, which I feel is an important conversation we should be having:

“Hi, [reader’s name]. The complete statement you are quoting here [from my post yesterday] is: “[i]nterest in mythology of ancient cultures, or the scholarship therein, is NOT religion; that would be mythology or literature studies.” Obviously many (but not all) Polytheist religions have bodies of associated mythic literature, often descended from previous ancient oral traditions, which are expressions of the cultures, and societies, and eras that these come from. These mythic literary expressions lend themselves QUITE helpfully, and vitally, to the 21st century pursuits of Polytheist restoration and reconstitution. Mythology is wonderful, and where it exists for a given tradition, it is a HUGE boon to that religion.

However, generally speaking, mythology is a field of literature, NOT a religion. When you attend a university to study mythology, it is generally not part of the Religious Studies or even Philosophy or Theology departments; it is couched in literature or its own field of Mythography, or related. There are LOTS of secular scholars and interested parties in our world today who are fascinated by, and wanting to engage around the subject of, ancient mythology, for reasons which are NOT religious. For example, one regular commenter on our site is a mythology scholar who is a firm atheist and secularist, who is entirely disinterested in our religious communities rights, freedoms, needs, or theological developments: he comments ONLY to antagonize and criticize authors. (Often the mythological needs or inclinations of a secularist are entirely separate from those of a Polytheist religionist.) This person will argue (to death, really) any point he finds a grip on in a column, pulling the conversation COMPLETELY away from religion, and into pedantic nonsense that wouldn’t even be tolerated in true academic circles, secular or otherwise.

It is also important to note that mythologies of the ancient world are only infrequently intended as religious texts. They are records of oral traditions and expressions of culture, and are more often *based* on the religious expressions and values of that people, rather than forming it. The Norse did not rely on “the Lore” for their religion, rather “the Lore” is descended from commentaries on their religion. The Hellenes did not rely on Greek literature for their religion, rather these myths were written in descending explanation and record of the religions of a given Greek region.

Practitioners today often treat mythic literature as a holy book akin to Abrahamic religions and their books, which is in most cases not how these texts were regarded in their parent cultures. They are useful collections of myths for us today, when and how they relate to our individual religious relationships. (Many gods and pantheons simply do not appear in surviving mythic literature, however, and so they are hardly the only means of relating to our gods.)

My bookshelves, similar yours, probably, are lined with mythology books. I draw from mythic literature and recorded story as much as anyone else in my religion’s practices and considerations. My statements are NOT against mythology, or those who utilize mythology in their religious pursuits. Similarly they are NOT to be read as anti-academic, or even anti-secular. (In fact, I’ve dedicated a whole set of statements around this in the FAQ of the site, discussing how we are not “anti-” anything, simply for having a dedicated space for religious dialog.) As some of our primary contributors are professional academic scholars and professors themselves (Edward Butler, PSVL, Galina Krasskova, etc) we as a platform are clearly NOT anti-academia; however we are also not a secular academic publication house.

The needs of secular inquiry are often quite different than those of the religionist, simply put, and we at Polytheist.com ascribe value to the idea that recognizing distinctions between differentiate things — in this case, (1) secular academic pursuit and (2) religious dialog, academic or otherwise — is valuable and important, but moreso, intrinsically necessary for the restoration and reconstitution of Polytheist religion in our increasingly secular world. (This, again, should not be read as an anti-secular statement, but rather that the growing tides of secularism, especially radical secularism, often stand as directly and literally named adversaries and antagonists to religious development, thought, and freedoms of practice. This is evidenced time and again on other websites, whose “comments” sections and forums light up with atheo-pagans intruding on, or repeatedly assaulting in generalized spaces, Polytheist dialog for no purpose greater than to besmirch it, us, our traditions, and our gods. Disempowerment and trivialization are the first steps in the game of eugenic erasure.)

In conclusion, my statement is plainly this: Polytheist.com is a religious site. There are LOTS of secular places for secular mythographers to go and get pedantic and antagonistic about whathaveyou. This is NOT those sites. It does not exist to serve the secular needs of the secular/atheist mythography fandom.”

By equating our religious traditions to our mythic (literary) traditions, atheist scholars are able to couch our religions forever in the field of hypothetical and pedantic debate: we are merely zoo animals for them, playing out in the sandbox that they themselves feel ownership around because of their own lineages (of academic descent). By failing to dissent from this supposition — that our traditions and these myths are wed intrinsically to one another, rather than distinct and occasionally intersecting or cross-supporting — we are failing to bucketedly bail out our still-compromised hull, which is taking on stagnant, heavy water.

“Compromise” is not a good thing, as the line-above statement illustrates clearly. A compromise is often lauded today (by secular theorists) as a mark of maturity and sophistication, a show of humility and problem-solving goodness. However, in the fields of conflict resolution and mediation facilitation, “compromise” is described as a “lose/lose” situation: all parties attached to a given problem suffer an individual or shared loss as the direct result of compromise. “Compromise”, then, needs to be understood as “taking damage and losing something as a result of it”. Sometimes compromises need to be made in the field because real life circumstances call for it — for example, flooding some chambers of a water craft and losing access to them in the process, in order to save the rest of the vessel during a legitimate real-time emergency — but these are by no means the ideal or standard circumstances. “Cooperative resolutions” are, however, described as “win/win” dynamics, wherein all parties are recognized distinctly, and subsequently, their distinct needs are identified and collaborated around to arrive at agreements which serve all at the table in some manner.

Realistically speaking, it is impractical, unhelpful, and also stupid to suggest that mythologies from a given ancient Polytheistic culture are “strictly religious” and therefore secularist scholars are intruding upon them by engaging them. This is an ahistorical stance to begin with; these myths were often recorded for relatively secular purposes, or at least tangental to religious focus; they descended from religions, rather than being the precursor to them, and hold relevance (for example, in the study of world history or literary developments) outside of religion. So, it would be illogical and wrong to attempt to “prevent secular study of mythology”. Right? Right.

However, secular scholars are often pitted against religious communities, unable to recognize the “end point” of their lens of consideration and purview, and intrusively try to deny religionists access to discussing mythologies from a religious/theological standpoint without secular oversight or involvement. In other words, there is an (often unspoken, but sometimes named) view that popularly speaking, religionists — Polytheists — are not welcome in mythographic studies or engagement. (Don’t believe me? Ask some of the many devotional Polytheists working in academia.)

And so distinctions become necessary. Our myths are not our religions, they are tools and fields of study which may lend themselves to our religion. (Similarly, alcohol is not religion, nor is the study of how alcohol is made, nor the science of alcohol’s impact on the human body. The inclusion of alcohol within religious practices does not synonymize them. Read more about how to determine if something is something or something else here.)

But along this same grain, we as religious communities must hold space for these distinctions not merely to preserve the integrity of our hull from secular collision, but also to prevent internal combustion of the sort that leads to detonation. Polytheist religion is about relationships and total world views and experiences, not merely hypotheticals and stories and myths. Our myths are instructive, certainly, but they are hardly set in stone. Regional cultus — that is, the relational recognition that the gods and spirits engage with different regions of people and groups and traditions of people in accordance with different agreements, agendas, or avenues of experiential deliverance — in both ancient and modern execution indicates that mythic structures may switch out, and swap around, or collapse in on themselves in individual cultic bodies, meaning that two closely related cults may have wildly different interpretations or even sequences of related myths. Because the purpose of myths is not to be “the one true mythic story” or a historic account or a metaphysical topography; the purpose of myth is to be myth, which is a vehicle for certain important-to-religion things (such as the vesseled delivery of moral or cosmogonic lesson, parablic illustration of culture/society dynamic, or hidden Mystery road to an understanding of destiny’s hand-hold in the universe.)

Polytheist religion is not a religion based upon mythology, nor an anachronism seeking to recreate through role-play the ways of the ancients, but rather these are religions of relationship and recognized distinctions, which are free to draw equally from myth as it is written or myth as it is re-interpreted or dreams as they are received by dedicated oracles or science or philosophy or experiences mythically unfolded in real and present time against the gods and forces of our traditions embodied physically in some mannered corner of our incarnate world. We must, as religionists, honor the scholars and academic minds (and traditions!) which have preserved so much rich history and accounted record of these ancient ways and stories, while simultaneously recognizing our pursuits as separate (and not even parallel to) those and theirs, which is itself NOT a suggestion of antagonistic regard or dismissal. We must, as religions, honor the academic heritage of our secular world, without allowing it to transform our Polytheist traditions into “Bulfinchian Religion”.

As in many things, it is an “And/Or” rather than “pick one, motherfucker!”. One can be a Polytheist religionist and also enjoy secular study of literary myth. One can be a secular mythographer and also choose not to deny rights, freedoms, and liberties to religious groups one is not affiliated with; the existence of religious groups does not negate the importance of secular scholarship, nor does the popularity and mainstream acceptability of secular scholarship mandate that Polytheist religionists must suspend religious considerations when engaging mythological literature. One can, and indeed, MUST, learn to navigate between these things, discerning between and identifying lenses of consideration, motives of inquiry, and intentions of engagement with a given field, body of material, or practice.

“…polytheistic religious scholarship and study of these texts is its own pursuit and offers unique gifts and insights that are distinct from a secular study of the same material. By that, I mean study of mythic texts and cultural records for religious purposes and employing the tools and insights of polytheistic religion. In academic scholarship, currently there is no place for this sort of religious scholarship of pre-Christian mythic material. You aren’t taken seriously if you attempt it at all. So this is something that is only being done by a small minority of independent polytheist scholars. But I think it’s hugely valuable.”

“The indispensable element in mythological hermeneutics, for the polytheist, is the relationship with the Gods. This is the touchstone; when Plato criticizes the poets in the Republic, it’s because the things the poets say about the Gods, if they were taken literally, could get in the way of people developing a proper relationship with Them, and that is the prime value. So the whole interpretation of myth by Platonists in late antiquity, where myth does attain a status somewhat like scripture—we find there the term theomythia, “divine myth”—is guided by the truths about the Gods that are inherent in right relationship with Them and constitutive for that relationship. Without this, one would just be doing structuralism, where motifs are shuffled and reshuffled according to an utterly indifferent algebra of signs, or Durkheimian religious studies, where Gods and worshipers alike drop out, as the society is the only integral unit.”

Material, be it physically objective, conceptual, divine, tangible or intangible, can be considered through any number of lenses of consideration, by which I mean through any number of “disciplines“. One might engage in the study of a tree by assessing its relationship to fungal cultures or bacterium or avian tenants, or they may engage instead as an ecologically informed economist assessing the literal chemical dollar value of the annual output of oxygen produced by said tree, or they may instead observe the tree as an impressionist painter, or as a writer of apocalyptic death sonnets, or as an amateur architect designing and building their first tree-house. The tree is still a tree in each of these engagements, but the relationship that the tree holds to each of these observing and engaging agents is an entirely different dynamic. Attempting to forbid the study of avian occupation of coniferous groves on the grounds that these do not properly address the importance of a rare invasive invisible protozoan which feeds on indigenous fungal matter is non-sense, as would be attempting to synonymize the tree-house-builder with the economic chemist with the apocalyptic death sonneteer. There are different distinct disciplines because doing things is a whole lot easier when one can properly identify what it is that they are doing, and why.

Discipline is hard, and the disciplined engagement with various disciplines is harder still. One such tricksy discipline is that of discernment, which as I have written before requires certain combinations of things recognized in their relational sequence: (1) *distinctions* drawn between things identified by their context (2) *definitions*. That is to say…

the discipline of discernment draws upon delineated distinctions which in turn require explored and recognized definitions appropriate to the context.

…people get hung up in the endless circle-jerk debate of belief-vs-practice, and blah blah blah: mostly it’s a “cake and eat it, too!” scenario, where they want all the social perks of being a slick wizarding magico prince, without the burden of actual cultural and cognitive commitment. And/or claim to “worship nature” without the burden of having to actually do anything to help it in an ecologically responsible way.

To me it is far less about belief OR practice, but instead about commitment: if their commitment to these things does not go beyond wearing funny spirit-bling and having edgy shrines (sorry, they probably just have altars, because why would they ever denigrate* themselves enough to venerate?) or attending teachings (or leading teachings) at occult bookshops, no matter how much money they throw down on awesome initiations, they’re a godsdamned fraud. These are not just practices, and they are also not just ways of life: they are whole ways of being, of perceiving, of engaging, of relating, and of being engaged and of being related.

In my experience people who get hung up on the masturbatory debate of praxis vs doxa are just jerking off in the mirror and haven’t committed to anything beyond the length of their own shallow reflection. People who talk about Self, or make religion about themselves (or humanistically focused) are just trying to find a way to keep stroking it in the post-modern self-reflective mirror-gaze without needing to stagger out of their daze and engage the world they claim to hold at the center.

Protip: if you’re human centered, probably choosing a set of practices or beliefs or commitments actually focused around humans might be a good place to start, rather than trolling religious communities and websites with reprehensibly wrong-headed and callous-hearted antagonism just to try and justify continuing on, which is probably not the best approach. Psychology, counseling, social justice engagement, environmental pursuits: these are all fantastic avenues which are not religions (even if sponsored to action through a religious community or body) and they do not involve robbing people of meaning by polluting it with… vacant words.

Basically I’m sick to death of pseudo-intellectual imperialist “sorcerously inclined” occultists, or would-be Pagans professing purely atheistic agendas and reducing religious meaning to mere metaphor for some other end, who spend lots of digital ink space trying desperately to look a part — basically any part — with flip-flopping attitudes on things they think they are supposed to have an opinion on, with either no commitment, or a staggering OVER commitment to the idea of commitment (usually paired with the aforementioned flip-flopping, between traditions or between ideologies or between philosophies, all of which are asserted as genuine in the moment) without any actual genuine embodiment that comes from “doing one’s business” in an actually and actively “this-is-being” quality of cultural existence. In other words, a bunch of people trying to play a part because this is all theatrics for them, and too few actually embodying the roles they were actually cast into. (Which is, as an aside, also an affront to actual theater.)

So why are there people doing “magic” and “divination” and writing a lot about Paganism if they’re secular atheists or otherwise don’t believe in magic or spirits or gods?

Because “cake and eat it, too!” allows for this bullshit, in a culture of rampant unrestricted and unregulated “co-creation call-it-what-you-want” pseudo-relativity. People get to do what they want, with a Cartman voice, and everyone else scratches their balls and pats their back and attaboys them forward, because so long as everyone else is behaving fraudulently, any given person who opts not to call them on it gets to do the same. This would be the epitome of a culture of enabled entitlement.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” is a sentiment applied to authenticity in magical and alternative/minority religious communities. So long as nobody rocks the boat by pointing out that the boat isn’t even a fucking boat and is being helmed by people who don’t even believe in the sea, everyone gets free membership and goodie-bag credentials at the door, with an Etsy shop soon to follow, and funny titles from exotic traditions they totally just found out about and are “destined” to waltz into because they heard about it last week or whatever.

…because atheopathic secular Playganism is way “in” right now, didn’t you know?

*Denigrate: Obviously I’m being sarcastic here, and mocking self-righteous and self-important humanist impiety. There is nothing denigrating about venerating the Holy Powers, you dumb shits.

Special thanks to Jesse Hathaway of Wolf & Goat for providing the initial space on social media for this conversation to unfold; the above are slightly refined/cleaned up accounts of my contributions to a thread begun by him.

I often criticize the attempt to define something by what it is not. For example, it’s illogical to define “red” by saying “a primary color that isn’t blue or yellow”. However, when people keep consistently missing the point and abusing language and meaning, sometimes it’s necessary to do so.

“Polytheism” is the religious regard for, and acknowledgment of, many gods.

Polytheism is not reductive, even if paired with a cosmology or philosophy which holds to a belief in a singular substance/source of all things (e.g. a divine vat of Playdough or the Big Bang or a festering corpse from a giant llama that died before creation and from which sprang All), because Polytheism is a -theism, not a random #-ism. It isn’t Polyism, it is PolyTHEISM, meaning that it is a religious consideration centered around the gods; it is by and large disinterested in things which are not the gods. That doesn’t mean that those other considerations are null and void (such as examining other things which are not gods, such as grains of rice, agriculture, horticulture, sex with a blender, or a festering llama corpse hung from your child’s basketball net) but rather that they are not part of a Polytheistic lens of consideration and discourse. It turns out that being a Polytheist doesn’t prevent one from also drinking coffee (protip: Folgers is not a god) or operating machinery (also not gods) or going to the post office (definitely not gods). Similarly, there is room in some Polytheisms for a substance monism. But that is not in and of itself a Polytheism, nor is is particularly relevant in the consideration of Polytheistic theological or practical “things”.

Polytheist religion is also not atheistic academic banter, or debates about mythology, or post-Christian writing. Those would be, just like Folgers and festering llama corpses, OTHER things.

There may be intersections between considerations of many gods (Polytheism) and other-than-theistic considerations (such as Folgers) but that doesn’t make the one into the other. That makes them an intersection.

Similarly, that two gods share a syncretic relationship does not make them one god, although a single god may in fact spring from such syncretism… which, in such a case, would mean a third god, not the loss of the initial two (or more).

Polytheist religion is expansive and even exponential; it is inclusive, rather than restrictive and reductive. It is relational; that is, it is about relationships between things (plural, many), and not about the reduction of these relationships into smaller numbers of things. The models of the individuality of the gods — and their relationships to us, and ours to them — are similarly apart from relationships with other things (such as coffee, coffee companies, and spirits).

Polytheist religion has spirits, some of whom may well also be gods, others of whom descend from gods, others of whom host the gods within themselves, just as we humans and human-shaped-creatures sometimes do, in process of possession. Some are ancestors or wrathful dead, others are quirky personalities residing in objects the secular world might consider inanimate. In this way, Polytheist religion often overlaps, or runs alongside congruently, various animist understandings.

It is about many things. Not one things, not some things, not an ever reducing number of things.

If you don’t like math, that’s okay: you’re not required to count.

Polytheist religion cannot be counted; it is too big to count.

So if you like math? Fantastic, there’s lots of math here. Don’t like math? Great! Stop trying to count all the things. It is often enough to acknowledge that there are many of them, and that they exist, and that you may (or may not) know and count some of that many. (Example: I like coffee, but I do not like Folgers coffee. That does not mean that Folgers coffee does not exist, nor would it be sensible to assume that my coffee, being coffee, is the same as Folgers coffee, which is a different sort of thing entirely. Further, my taste in coffee may not be congruent with others, because our universe has many tastes in coffee. I do not need to know all the types of coffee to acknowledge that there are many of them; I gain little in attempting to count all of the types of coffee, and similarly, my failure to properly account for every specific type or expression or taste of/in coffee does not invalidate them, nor put them in contest with other facets of reality.) Attempts to negate the many (gods, coffees) by collapsing them telescopically into less many is bad math. Stop that.